Why Star Wars: Rogue One Will Feel More Intense Than Any Previous Star Wars Movie

If you wanted to describe Rogue One: A Star Wars Story to a complete stranger, you'd be hard pressed to find an exact genre that encapsulates the entire experience. Straddling the lines of action-adventure, sci-fi, war movie, and heist caper, the Gareth Edwards directed film promises to be an experience unlike anything Star Wars fans have seen to this point. Just ask any of the actors involved in the film, such as The Night Of's Riz Ahmed.

The hot young star was recently spotted in an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and Ahmed had some pretty awesome words that described why Rogue One: A Star Wars Story isn't just the prequel flavored cash grab that some may think it is. In fact, Ahmed suggests that the following factors set the film apart from the rest of the canon:

It's different to the other Star Wars movies. It feels very immersive and is a boots-on-the-ground feel. We'd do these intense scenes and we'd do it again and again without stopping. The whole film has a really intense energy, partly because of that process but partly because we never got a break to go to the toilet.

Riz Ahmed comments on the shoot for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story make it sound like the film really put him through his paces. On top of that, they echo the sentiment that the movie that's been sold day on as Star Wars meets a war movie is still going to deliver on that promise. The key phrase "boots on the ground" pretty much invokes that sort of spirit, and it's the approach we've seen in the trailers thus far. However, that isn't enough to completely convince us that the film we were promised from the beginning is still going to be the one we get in the end.

With a highly publicized round of re-shoots that are supposed to put the film more in line with 1977's Star Wars: A New Hope, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story has always threatened to turn into a different experience than as advertised. While the war movie aesthetic has been talked up in the past, the final product's "edge" factor has yet to be seen. In the best case scenario, Riz Ahmed's time on the re-shoots was long enough that he's in a significant amount of the new footage, thus confirming that the editing process hasn't watered down Rogue One: A Star Wars Story all that much.

Of course, there's a possibility that the edit that makes the grade might be one where Ahmed's character is reduced and/or changed from what he remembers shooting on set. While we hope that's not the case, we are coming off of a summer where we were promised a lot more Suicide Squad than we got, and found ourselves scratching our heads as to how the trailers could have steered us so wrong. Regardless of whatever editorial changes may have been made, at least Riz Ahmed's perceived version on what Rogue One: A Star Wars Story aligns with the version of the film that we want to see on the big screen. Seeing how close the version that will hit theaters on December 16th will match up to the original intent will definitely be part of the fun.